bjwil1991 wrote:

https://learn.getgrav.org/user/pages/11.troubleshooting/01.page-not-found/error-404.png […]
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You had a 404 today? 😜

I'm gonna spray paint an HP dc7600 tower

I recieved them two cables that I bought. They are converter cables, that allow me to use an unmodded PC floppy drive in my Amiga. Before anyone start with "why don't you just mod a drive", my answer is: I suck big time at soldering smd.

Using this cable, I can keep the floppy drive as a pc drive, if I for some reason need to use it in a pc in the future. And things are plug and play. It can even be used, to replace the floppy drive it self, in an external Amiga Floppy drive. I had a multi-disk game running. I even did a test, using d-copy were the drive was used as the target drive, as well as the source drive.

dionb wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

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You had a 404 today? 😜

Computer joke. Plus, this is Page 404 on this thread.

Yeah, the friends I had in 1984 with monochrome monitors all had green monitors and I had CGA back then. I did like those monochrome monitors that with a push of a button you could switch between green and amber.

I've had 4 monitors that did that, all of them were EGA, 2 were NEC MultiSyncs (a Multisync I JC-1401, and the JC-1402 I currently have). The other two were a really nice Mitsubishi I wish I had not gotten rid of, and a Imtec that had a really burned out CRT.

The NECs and Mitsubishi could all do Green, Amber, and White Phosphor mono emulation, AND CGA/EGA/MDA/HERC

The NEC's could also be fitted with an Adapter that allows them to do up to 800x600 at 56 Hz, though the dot pitch makes it slightly blurry, but still impressive a 1986-1988 era monitor could pull that off as well as it did as it was still on par with early 90's stuff. However, Monochrome emulation mode only works with CGA/EGA on those monitors.

Speaking of the NEC, had to repair the cabling on it last night. The DB-9 in the back started getting loose (the one I replaced), so I literally WELDED that puppy to it's circuit board, it's rock soild now. Plus I touched up the traces on the cracked PCB and the wires used to bypass them for some redundancy. I plan to keep that thing a very long time. The CRT is super healthy, I'm barely using any voltage to keep it up and running, it's extremely crisp for a 1980's color monitor doing VGA, even in 800x600 @56 Hz (though I have to make a bunch of horizontal/vertical adjustments from the manual control panel, but that's fine with me). I think touching up the wiring and reseating the neck board really helped too.

Also did a bunch of other stuff last night....

I used an older virtual CD-ROM utility to copy Diablo to the F: partition on my 40GB HDD I have Windows 95 OSR 2 Installed on. Man, I'm doing this one again! It's nice not having to break out the CD-ROMs to play games on the 486. Next is Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist - the Talkie version! Diablo was running even nicer than usual. Got to try Battle.net if it's still around.

I also did some changes to the Hard disk controller on the 486 as well. I've had that VLB card for awhile, I switched it into 50 MHz bus mode, though Im running 33MHz BUS because - well - wanted to see if I gain some speed, then I changed the latency from 600ms to 280ms because I'm using PIO4 ATA-133 hard disks in this thing. Now it's running pretty darned fast. Windows 95 boots in 10 seconds, got to try recording multitrack demos on this beast again sometime.

Also just sold some items on e-bay, just need to pack em' up and ship em' off when I have time. XT keyboard, Casio SK-1, and I'm waiting on a guy to buy the 2 hardcards I have up there. Will be digging through packing materials tonight to make sure I can pack everything nicely and safely.

^^ WHat'd the XT keyboard go for? I've got a Model F I've been thinking about selling - I'll likely never use it.

I did a quick function test of a Gigabyte GA-486VF VLB 486 motherboard.

When I did an Internet search to find out some jumper settings I got 2 Vogons related hits on the first page.

The first hit was an old Vogons thread from 2009 started by a long time member with many retro games in his user name (perhaps even 100). He was asking if the GA-486VF motherboard was any good and mentioned that he wasn't happy with it's layout. Later in the thread he informed us that he had driven all his VLB stuff (including this board and an ARK1000VL video card) to the recycling center because he "just got so fed up with the whole VLB thing" even though the hardware was fully working.

The second hit was an Ebay auction from 2017 where another long time Vogons member sold a Gigabyte GA-486VF with an Intel DX4 CPU (but no video card etc) for 120 euro... 😁

What have we learned from this? 😜

That people are selling those boards for profit? Those things might be worth something, and they're hard to come across online nowadays.

bjwil1991 wrote:

That people are selling those boards for profit? Those things might be worth something, and they're hard to come across online nowadays.

All of those and perhaps that if there is space in your closet then to not throw things away just because you got fed up with them for the moment could be advantageous. A lesson I like many others have leared the hard way.

With luck the hardware in question got rescued by someone.

Exceptions should be made for proprietary run-of-the-mill Pentium 4 era small form factor systems, please junk them all...

Jed118 wrote:

^^ WHat'd the XT keyboard go for? I've got a Model F I've been thinking about selling - I'll likely never use it.

Something like $10.00 - it was a BTC keyboard 5060XT - I have no need for it, my XT system of choice these days is my Tandy 1000. Most of my e-bay selling currently is to purge off the computer parts and equiptment I don't need anymore or want anymore.

The plan is by May/June to move to Reno NV. So I'm downsizing to 3 vintage PC's, one modern desktop, and one modern laptop. I'm keeping one LCD and one CRT (the NEC). I'm putting the contents of each PC into ziplock bags to keep the parts/controllers/etc. together when I move.

The ultimate plan is we want to buy a house, it's just too expensive where we live currently and no good new programs to buy. Once we buy a house, I can get back to vintage computer wackiness on a bit fuller scale, though what I really want to do is take my TAndy, 486, and 286, and put them at a dedicated table, plugged into a switch and connected to the home LAN with some retro 1980's-early 1990's office style decor around it so running the machine you get the full experience.

Jed118 wrote:

^^ WHat'd the XT keyboard go for? I've got a Model F I've been thinking about selling - I'll likely never use it.

The AT flavour of IBM model F keyboard sold for about $366 on the Swedish auction site Tradera not long ago. I guess the XT model is perhaps a bit less sought after.

https://www.tradera.com/item/340854/300345000 … #view-item-main

Side panel spray painted. Other parts are drying.

Skyscraper wrote:

All of those and perhaps that if there is space in your closet then to not throw things away just because you got fed up with them for the moment could be advantageous. A lesson I like many others have leared the hard way.

With luck the hardware in question got rescued by someone.

Exceptions should be made for proprietary run-of-the-mill Pentium 4 era small form factor systems, please junk them all...

I paid $17 for a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus at a thrift store, and $10 for a Pentium 4 machine as well. Scrapped the Pentium 4 (I have the Riva TNT2 card in my Socket 370, which, in the future, will host the Socket 754 setup with SATA and an SSD with Windows 98SE on it), while I still have the parts for the $10 P4 machine (motherboard, CD burner, cables, etc) and I installed the power switch from the P4 machine into my K6-2/300 machine since the button I had installed broke off (from a busted VCR/DVD combo). My PC parts are in a dresser drawer in my room.

brostenen wrote:

I recieved them two cables that I bought. They are converter cables, that allow me to use an unmodded PC floppy drive in my Amig […]
Show full quote

I recieved them two cables that I bought. They are converter cables, that allow me to use an unmodded PC floppy drive in my Amiga. Before anyone start with "why don't you just mod a drive", my answer is: I suck big time at soldering smd.

Using this cable, I can keep the floppy drive as a pc drive, if I for some reason need to use it in a pc in the future. And things are plug and play. It can even be used, to replace the floppy drive it self, in an external Amiga Floppy drive. I had a multi-disk game running. I even did a test, using d-copy were the drive was used as the target drive, as well as the source drive.

Cable-01.jpg

Cable-02.jpg

Cable-03.jpg

Does that let you read & write 880k disks on a standard PC HD drive? Or is it just for using 1.44MB disks?

I'm continuing my adventures with the Gigabyte GA-486VF VLB board (from the big lot).

The board was POSTing fine (after some jumper adjustment) and could be booted from a floppy but when I ran Speedsys I noticed that the L2 cache was missing. A quick check confirmed that there were 8 chips in the cache sockets. I checked the jumper settings and they diddn't match but when I corrected them the cache was still missing.

Then I noticed the tag sram chip was missing, its at the edge of the board a bit removed from the other sockets. I added a tag chip but no still no L2 cache. Then I removed the chips and sure enough one chip had two pins bent more than 90 degrees, the first I managed to correct the second broke off. The scrap cache chip box to the rescure!

A few years ago I bought a smallish box full of cache chips with somewhat bent pins and with enough dirt, dust and hair to confirm that they at some time had been stored in an less than optimal way. I decided to replace all 8 chips just because and added 8 random 28pin 32kb chips from the box. The motherboard now found cache but only 128KB and the system froze as soon as it tried to BOOT my DOS 8 start disk. I replaced the first 4 chips with 4 other chips and tried again and finally the motherboard found 256KB cache,

I'm doing some benchmarking now to see that my mismatch of random ISSI, UMC and Winbond chips behave nicly and will run tight cache settings. If I run into issues I will have to find wich brand works best or perhaps even try to find which individual chips are the culprit.

My Packard Bell wouldn't get past the BIOS screen with the L2 cache installed until I hit the reset button. Windows 95 and MS-DOS complains about bad memory, or applications/programs crash left and right. Maybe the L2 cache that I purchased was dead in the water (minus the 64kx1 22-pin 15ns one).

xjas wrote:

brostenen wrote:

I recieved them two cables that I bought. They are converter cables, that allow me to use an unmodded PC floppy drive in my Amig […]
Show full quote

I recieved them two cables that I bought. They are converter cables, that allow me to use an unmodded PC floppy drive in my Amiga. Before anyone start with "why don't you just mod a drive", my answer is: I suck big time at soldering smd.

Using this cable, I can keep the floppy drive as a pc drive, if I for some reason need to use it in a pc in the future. And things are plug and play. It can even be used, to replace the floppy drive it self, in an external Amiga Floppy drive. I had a multi-disk game running. I even did a test, using d-copy were the drive was used as the target drive, as well as the source drive.

Cable-01.jpg

Cable-02.jpg

Cable-03.jpg

Does that let you read & write 880k disks on a standard PC HD drive? Or is it just for using 1.44MB disks?

It lets me use a 1.44mb PC floppy drive, as a 880kb Amiga drive on any Amiga.
This however does not work on Escom Amiga's yet it makes it easier to source drives.

brostenen wrote:

I recieved them two cables that I bought. They are converter cables, that allow me to use an unmodded PC floppy drive in my Amiga. Before anyone start with "why don't you just mod a drive", my answer is: I suck big time at soldering smd.

Using this cable, I can keep the floppy drive as a pc drive, if I for some reason need to use it in a pc in the future.

While I understand your argument, if you want to use a PC floppy drive with that cable as an internal drive, you have to modify it anyway to make it fit. Also, this cable will not give you a ready signal with many PC drives, as PC drives tend to generate a ready signal but not provide it on the connector unless you solder it to do so. A missing ready signal can lead to many incompatibilities.

derSammler wrote:

brostenen wrote:

I recieved them two cables that I bought. They are converter cables, that allow me to use an unmodded PC floppy drive in my Amiga. Before anyone start with "why don't you just mod a drive", my answer is: I suck big time at soldering smd.

Using this cable, I can keep the floppy drive as a pc drive, if I for some reason need to use it in a pc in the future.

While I understand your argument, if you want to use a PC floppy drive with that cable as an internal drive, you have to modify it anyway to make it fit. Also, this cable will not give you a ready signal with many PC drives, as PC drives tend to generate a ready signal but not provide it on the connector unless you solder it to do so. A missing ready signal can lead to many incompatibilities.

I don't know if it provides ready signal or not. All I know is that it works in my external drive case, just as if it was an original drive.
I will ask the seller, if this provides ready signal or not. There are after all, an integrated circuit on the pcb.

Update on the ready signal matter....
I recieved the following answer from the seller, after I asked about the ready signal thing.
Not quite shure what all this means, yet the following is the seller's reply to if it provides ready signal or not.

Yes, it provides a ready signal by combining index and sel signals from amiga through a logic gate chip.
That's why any pc floppy drive behaves exactly like a real amiga drive 😉

Regards,

John.

I guess I was right on that integrated circuit. What else would it do there?